Eight months on and Lusi still spews mud

By Michael Reilly

Looking out across the vast vista of steaming mud, Rene Nijenhuis had a feeling the volcano wasn’t going to stop any time soon.

A coordinator with the UN’s Environmental Emergency Section, Nijenhuis was dispatched to Sidoarjo, Indonesia, after a mud volcano began erupting there, seemingly out of nowhere, on 29 May 2006. Five million litres of hot slurry was spewing out each day and smothering everything in the vicinity. Thousands were forced to flee their homes and villages. The mud gobbled up thousands of acres of farmland, highways, schools and factories.

Worse, no one knew why it was happening. Now, more than six months later, the first scientific study is blaming Lapindo Brantas, an oil company that had been drilling just 200 metres from where the volcano’s main vent appeared. This seems to justify the Indonesian government’s decision to hold the company responsible for most of the costs related to the disaster, which have since spiralled to nearly &dollar;500 million. Meanwhile, Lusi – the local people’s name for the volcano – continues erupting apace, and no one seems sure how to dispose of the mud without causing an ecological disaster.

A team led by Richard Davies of the University of Durham, UK, is arguing that drilling was indeed the cause of the eruption. The researchers found that conditions in the rocks and water-rich sediments beneath Sidoarjo may have been ripe for a rare drilling catastrophe known as a subsurface blowout, in turn creating Lusi.

Much of Earth’s hydrocarbons are stored in rock that is rich in water and organic matter. Besides being ideal for the formation of large reservoirs of oil and gas, this type of geology can ...

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